"Defense ties between South Korea and Saudi Arabia are relatively new within the last decade; pacts were signed to boost defense and intelligence cooperation in 2013 and 2017," Emily Hawthorne, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at the risk intelligence company RANE, told me. "But cooperation has accelerated in recent years as Saudi Arabia has significantly invested in its own domestic military industry, and as Saudi Arabia has worked to diversify its range of military suppliers away from a firm reliance on U.S. equipment."

Read the full Forbes article by Paul Iddon here.